Teaching birds bred in captivity to migrate
A Siberian legend says that cranes are not birds at all, but brave warriors, slain in battle. Instead of going to their graves, these heroes returned to life as majestic white birds —ghost birds.
David "Patch" Sakrison '73 has written, "Chasing the Ghost Birds," (Watson Street Press, 2007), which tells the inside story of three major conservation projects. These include bringing the whooping crane back from the brink of extinction; bringing trumpeter swans back to Wisconsin and the Midwest after an absence of more than 100 years; and a final effort to save Russia's threatened Siberian cranes.
It's the first of these projects that he'll focus on Monday evening, June 15, at 7:00 p.m. at the Louisville Nature Center, located at 3745 Illinois Avenue. He'll also sign copies of his book at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington, Ky., Wednesday, June 17 at 7:00 p.m., and at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Newport, Ky., Saturday, June 20 from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m., and at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., June 27.
Sakrison plans to touch on the whoopers' natural history and describe in detail the process of teaching captive-raised cranes to migrate by using ultralight aircraft, a project described as the conservation equivalent of putting a man on the moon.
Why was the project so difficult? "First, there were so few of them left," said Sakrison. "(There were) only about 16 in the wild in 1946. It made it difficult to study them." Once native to most of North America, hunting during the 19th century, and the loss of their wetland habitats, drove the cranes to near extinction.
Teaching cranes bred in captivity to migrate proved challenging, but not impossible. "Songbirds are hard-wired to (migrate)," he said, "but while cranes have the urge (to migrate), they learn the route from their parents." The ultralights served as surrogates.
It all started when Bill Carrick, a Canadian wildlife photographer, taught some captive-raised Canada geese to follow his boat so he could film them in flight. Biologist Kent Clegg – who met Carrick at a conference — raised a few sandhill cranes and taught them to follow his ultralight plane. Clegg then began pestering the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to let him lead them on a migration from Idaho to New Mexico. The rest is migration history.
Sakrison's involvement began when Terry and Mary Kohler, a business executive and pilot from Sheboygan, Wis., asked him to chronicle the three conservation projects listed above and their involvement with them. They were, "tired of having to explain to their friends what they were doing with all these silly birds." The Kohlers found Sakrison – an aviation journalist – through an aviation museum in Oshkosh, Wis.
Caring about the cranes is not only good for the environment, said Sakrison, it also makes good business sense. "Down in Texas, where whooping cranes winter, they bring about $6 mission a year in tourist money," he said. "If it costs $3 million a year to save them, that's pretty good math. They're paying their own way.
"We really have a responsibility to protect our fellow critters. When we fail to do that, it always seems to come back and bite us in the end. If you ignore the cranes, what species will you ignore next?"
For more information about Sakrison's book, visit www.chasingtheghostbirds.com.
